Gallup and Healthways recently released an annual survey that dubbed as well-being and there are some interesting things to draw from the survey.

For the second year in a row, Panama seems to be thriving in the five categories of the best countries:

Physical – looks at health and energy levels of people.

Community – checks to see if people like where they are living.

Financial – analyzes the ability of persons controls their economy.

Social lives – looks to see if people have desirable support in terms of relationships and love.

Purpose – aims at finding out the level of motivation of people to achieve goals plus knowing if they like what they do.

Life in Panama seems to be at it’s best with 53% of people in the country giving positive feedback in three or more of the five categories that were being researched. The US is 23rd in the rankings with 30.5 percent positive responses.

Afghanistan is rock bottom in the list – none of the residents is thriving in three or more of the categories. In fact, no resident is thriving in financial, purpose and social well-being metrics.

The top 10 on the list are:

Panama

Costa Rica

Puerto Rico

Switzerland

Belize

Chile

Denmark

Guatemala

Austria

Mexico

The worst of all the countries ranked from the bottom-most are:

Afghanistan

Bhutan

Cameroon

Togo

Tunisia

Congo-Kinshasa

Ivory Coast

Benin

Haiti

Ghana

The other interesting stat that was established from the survey is the fact that an average of 1 out of 6 adults was found to portray positive results in at least three of the categories.

On top of this, it was also found that Latin Americans displayed better levels of well-being than people from other parts of the world. These were based on the fact that Latin Americans characteristically portrayed better chances of exhibiting positive experiences like laughing, smiling, a sense of enjoyment and a feeling of respect for other people.

On the contrary, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had a relatively low level of well-being when compared to the other regions. The other interesting thing to note is that the sense of well-being index metrics was not correlated to the GDP of countries under the microscope.

In fact, some countries with great economic stability such as Korea and Croatia had poor well-being stats. However, war-torn populations had poor metrics thanks to the effects left by political instability.

Afghanistan is a classic example of a country in this category and it is no surprise that it sits at the base of the rankings.